This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
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Notes -
Writing an effortpost carries with it a number of implications:
-This is a thing you know (or think you know) a lot about.
-This is a thing you genuinely belief, and each word in here represent your own thoughts on the matter.
-This is a thing you care enough about to type out however much you typed out.
All of which then inform the way people are going to reply, argue, comment, and engage in discussion with you and others. Someone who makes an effortpost with an LLM is much less likely to follow up in response to people who respond to them, and much less likely to make good responses. There's little point in debating a particular point they made if they don't even believe or fully understand that point. Cases where the essay was collaboratively put together and edited with an LLM are less egregious examples of this, but still carry some of the issues. If you only know or care enough about this issue to write 500 words yourself about it, then don't make the readers read a 2500 word post inflating it with unnecessary things.
Maybe we just need a weekly or monthly LLM containment thread. "Here is a thing I asked AI about and the essay it gave me and I thought it was interesting and worth sharing/discussion." Because I think there can be value to it, it's just not the same sort of value as the main human-human discussions here.
In order to make an unordered list in Markdown, you have to (1) put a space after the hyphen at the start of each line and (2) press the Enter key twice, not just once, after each line.
I didn't think the OG markdown required a blank line between list items. But there are lots of variants: even Reddit doesn't render it consistently across its frontends.
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